Over on the Business Week blog, Rob Hof has a post on a new Amazon enterprise. It's a site called endless.com which specializes in shoes and handbags.
A lot of people tell me that they would never consider buying shoes over the Internet, since they worry about whether the shoe fits. I have ordered my shoes from catalogs, and, more recently, on the We, for years. I have a very simple reason for doing this: I wear a size - 10 AAA (the only too-thin body part I possess) - that is seldom if ever found in shoe stores.
Finding shoes that fit is made both possible and easy by the Internet. In a lot of cases, I already "know the brand" and know whether the last will fit. When I try a new brand, having to send it back if it's wrong is worth the gamble. Catering to "I-me-mine" brands is what the Internet does best. No one shoe store wants to carry an inventory in a size that few people wear, but when aggregated over the universe, well, there are probably a lot of us gals with feet that, if you put yellow socks on them, would resemble bananas.
So I took a look at endless.com and found that, when it came to my size, the choice could scarcely be categorized as endless. I searched for shoes in my size and the site only listed 3 pairs. (Over on Zappos, the yield was 66 pairs to choose from.)
I agree with Rob that, for Amazon, furthering its brand by having specific brands that deal with different product categories makes more sense than having Amazon expand into a 100% aggregator of all things to all buyers. Books and CDs are one thing. It makes sense to sell them in the same place. Books and shoes? I'm not buying. Good for Amazon for further spreading its vast wings - and exploiting all the infrastructure it's put in place around Internet shopping without diluting or confusing its core brand. That's smart business. And gives Amazon endless possibilities for expansion if people really do stop reading books and listening to CDs.
But as for the inventory on endless.com. Well, endless, my 10 AAA foot.
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